You might remember that back in the late 2000s and early 2010s many people blithely dismissed Twitter as a tool for nothing more than knowing what Stephen Fry had for breakfast. The harrumphing Twitter sceptics were everywhere with their gruff dismissals of what they saw as lightweight ephemera. I made a point of taking them on and trying to convince them of the platform’s value. If you had told me back then that, within the next decade, the White House would play host to a president who used Twitter as his or her primary mode of communication — that “the first Twitter President” was going to be a thing — I’d have been genuinely excited. “Stick that in your pipe and smoke it!”, I would have said to those sceptics.

In the end the sceptics lost the debate and they lost it hard. Worse, most of them ended up on Twitter themselves, in time to take part in the eventual death spiral that is now well underway. Because Twitter has become a dumpster fire: a raging, unstoppable inferno, casting toxic fumes and molten plastic blobs in all directions.

If this was the mid-2000s still, it wouldn’t be a problem. We’d just move on. If a forum’s admin turned out to be a Nazi sympathiser, or stood by while Nazis polluted all the threads with swastikas and frog cartoons, people would just leave. I’ve been involved in online communities for long enough to have seen numerous such mass migrations, where a critical mass of contributors moved off a mailing list or message board, leading to the whole community embarking on an exodus to the new, unblemished territory. Renewal and rejuvenation of the community usually followed.

Unfortunately it’s hard to imagine this happening today, now that Twitter and Facebook have formed what is essentially a duopoly in online community. Users of Twitter look to its owners to sort out the problems it has, and there’s a lot of anger at the business for its inability or unwillingness to do so. But what is yet to dawn on us, as a group, is that the onus is not on Jack Dorsey to change Twitter; the onus is on us to do what we would have done in the mid-2000s and just leave.

This is easier said than done though, because leaving Twitter at the moment feels like leaving the internet itself. It’s like you’ve made yourself invisible. And besides, Twitter remains the best place to go to complain or joke about how bad Twitter has become.

So I’ve resolved to start avoiding Twitter as much as I can, just for my own personal reasons. I could do without the feelings of anxiety, rage, frustration and depression that come from scrolling through the timeline that has become the moronic inferno made real.

But can I find a way to step back from Twitter without stepping back from the internet? If I find enough other people who are trying to do the same thing, then perhaps I will.

Related

Leave a comment

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

About me

I'm a digital strategist and user experience designer who overanalyses mundane topics and draws diagrams about them. You'll find some of these on this blog as well as lots of other stuff. Find out more about me or, if you can't be bothered to read all that text, follow me on Twitter.